eCommerce Customer Service: Ultimate Guide 2026

What is eCommerce customer service?

As a new eCommerce seller, you’ll focus on inventory, building your store, and marketing—but don’t overlook customer service. It’s key to success and includes answering product questions, handling returns, and keeping customers informed. Support is often provided via email, phone, chat, or helpdesk tools, with many stores starting small using chatbots. Leading brands prioritize live chat and automation to streamline support and enhance the customer experience.

Importance of eCommerce customer service

Imagine you're choosing between two online stores selling the same item at a similar price—one has a 90% approval rating, the other just 40%. Most shoppers would go with the better-rated store, and the reason is clear: customer service matters.

In fact, 90% of Americans consider customer service when deciding where to shop. Businesses that prioritize it can grow revenues 4%–8% above their market. After a positive service experience, 89% of customers are more likely to buy again, 83% feel more loyal, and 72% will share their experience with others.

These stats highlight why excellent customer service is critical to eCommerce success.

Increased social proof

Social proof is evidence provided by other shoppers that a company is trustworthy. Common examples of social proof include reviews, testimonials, and word-of-mouth recommendations.

Think about it. If you need a new hair stylist, and you’re stuck between two, you’re more likely to opt for the one who comes recommended by your best friend.

The better your customer service experience is and the more customer satisfaction your buyers experience, the more likely users are to leave positive reviews. The more positive reviews you have on your profile, the more likely you are to attract new customers. This creates a positive feedback loop that eventually transpires into increased revenue.

Increased repeat customers

Repeat customers are the bread and butter of your business. Too many businesses overlook the importance of repeat customers and instead spend all their time trying to attract new ones with deals and rewards. Repeat customers, however, are responsible for a significant portion of your sales.

One of the easiest ways to ensure your customers come back time and time again is to provide a great customer service experience.

Having a bad customer service experience can discourage consumers from shopping in the same place again, whereas quick response times and helpful support improve customer engagement.

Improve response times like CarParts.com

Fast response times are crucial - delays can drive customers to competitors. CarParts.com recognized this and aimed to lead on speed. But with millions of global customers, managing the high volume of support tickets was a major challenge.

The Solution:

CarParts.com turned to eDesk to centralize inbound queries and automate manual tasks, saving time and boosting efficiency. With global customer volumes, teamwork was vital—eDesk made collaboration easy through message tagging and shared threads. Its reporting tools helped the team improve response times and overall service by identifying exactly where improvements were needed.

Increased revenue

Improving your customer service solutions allows you to increase your revenue in a couple of ways. Not only will more customers flock to your store as a result of recommendations from friends or social proof, but better customer communication allows you to charge more for your products.

In fact, a whopping 68% of consumers are willing to spend more on products from a brand that’s known for its excellent eCommerce support.

Streamline your customer service like MyBoatStore

MyBoatStore faced the same issue as many other businesses during COVID-19 – a dramatic uplift in support tickets. Without an increase in resources and with an already stressed customer service team, MyBoatStore felt challenged by the sudden increase in customer service queries. That’s when they turned to eDesk to streamline their customer service strategy.

The Solution

Instead of switching between marketplaces, MyBoatStore used eDesk to consolidate all customer messages from Amazon and eBay into one dashboard. This streamlined workflow boosted productivity and helped restore their strong pre-pandemic customer service reputation.

7 ways to improve eCommerce customer service

On the rare occasion that you receive poor reviews for your products or customer service, it’s tempting to leave them and hope none of your potential customers see them. News flash: they’ll see them, and it looks even worse if you leave genuine reviews and complaints without a response.

Instead of ignoring the problem and hoping it goes away, leave a polite response apologizing for the issue and laying out how you’ll fix it – either with a refund, troubleshooting, or a vow to do better in the future.

That way, when potential customers see negative feedback on your profile, they’ll know that you take the opinions of customers seriously. Plus, you’ll improve the mood of the unhappy customer, making them more likely to become a repeat customer.

An SLA is a service-level agreement that does exactly what it says – commits you to a certain level of service. This agreement is typically made between a business and its clients/customers, and there tends to be a penalty for not meeting the service agreement. An example of a service-level agreement between you and a customer might be that you commit to responding to all their support tickets within 24 hours.

While committing your customer support team to high standards in SLAs might seem daunting, it can encourage you to prioritize your customer service by setting out targets and KPIs to meet.

Most of the time when companies provide poor customer service, it’s not because they don’t care about their customers. In the majority of circumstances, small business owners simply lack adequate time and resources to give customer queries the attention they deserve.

That’s where automation comes in.

With automation features, you can improve your customer service while actually spending less time on it (yep, really!).

With eCommerce customer service software that puts automation at the center of its strategy, you can automatically consolidate customer communications from all your sales channels alongside related order details for speedy responses.

Plus, you can instantly reply to common queries using rules to identify tickets that are suitable for template responses.

Not sure how well your customers think you’re performing? Customer service data will tell you. The best eCommerce customer service software offers insights, which let you know whether your business is heading in the right direction, using crucial metrics and trends.

Through powerful reports that highlight which products create the most support tickets or which products encourage the best reviews, you can use yesterday’s data to build tomorrow’s strategy.

From in-depth product insights, you’ll learn how to solve problems before they arise in the first place. Does one product keep attracting negative reviews? Discuss issues with your suppliers to get them fixed. Do customers return certain products at a higher frequency? Create a product video to give consumers a more accurate idea of what they’re ordering before it arrives.

With customer data, you can learn what’s helping and what’s hindering your revenue growth, and adjust your eCommerce support strategy accordingly.

The best e-commerce customer service approach involves empathizing with your customers, and the best way to create empathy is to see things through their eyes…literally.

In 2025, customers will no longer stand for customer service that stops and starts. If they begin a conversation with you on Facebook messenger, they don’t want to have to relay it to the agent working on your ticketing system. Customers expect you to have an overview of their previous interactions with your entire team.

With customer view, you can get an overview of all of a customer’s previous interactions with your site and your team. Using the full context of their order history and previous interactions, you can exceed expectations with communication that’s tailored especially to their situation. The best part? You can do it all quicker than ever.

We’ve all seen the ads for banks that offer money to new customers and stores that give users 10% off on their first order. There’s nothing wrong with using these incentives to attract and convert new customers, but don’t forget about your existing customer base in the process.

The key to cultivating and sustaining brand loyalty is rewarding customers for shopping with you regularly. Whether it’s offering free shipping on their next purchase or giving them $5 off for every $200 they spend, these small incentives differentiate you from competitors and leave your customers feeling valued.

Literally. If you open up your store to a global audience, you can’t expect your customers to always share a language with you. Show your international customers that you value their custom just as much by working with a live chat provider that offers auto-translate features

The bottom line

Great customer service is key to attracting and keeping loyal customers. A positive experience drives repeat purchases and word-of-mouth. If managing support is a challenge, helpdesk software like eDesk can centralize and automate your efforts—helping you stay ahead of competitors and grow your sales.